Free software is simply software that respects our freedom — our freedom to learn and understand the software we are using. Free software is designed to free the user from restrictions put in place by proprietary software, and so using free software lets you join a global community of people who are making the political and ethical assertion of our rights to learn and to share what we learn with others.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Linux grabs its single biggest win

The decision brings a 28 million dollar contract to the Linux community (who, exactly, will be getting this contract is unknown), but that is not all. Based on this (and other issues) with non-free software, the U.S. Department of Defense is laying out guidelines on how its agencies can use open source code. And even though the DOD's use of open source code will alter the GPL for said code (they can't, for obvious reasons, release any code they use and modify back into the wild), this is a huge deal for open source everywhere.